What is Agon light™?

Agon light™ is a fully open-source 8-bit microcomputer and microcontroller in one small, low-cost board, built with state-of-the-art 21st-century technology. It has two claims to fame, both of which are substantiated in the next sections. In a nutshell,

Agon light™ is the fastest and cheapest 8-bit microcomputer ever made.

In addition,

Agon light™ is the world's sole standalone, instant-on, BASIC-programmed microcontroller that dispenses with a host PC and sketch compilation.

This allows projects to be controlled from the immediacy of a BASIC interpreter's prompt.

The illustration below details Agon light™'s key technical specifications.

Agon light™ is a true 8-bit microcomputer in that there are no FPGAs and no emulation in it. It also has no layers of abstraction such as virtual machines. The bare metal is exposed directly to the firmware programmer.

As a microcomputer, Agon light™ has VGA resolution of up to 640 x 480 pixels and 64 simultaneous colors. It supports sprites and scores best in all popular microcomputer benchmarks by a large margin (see the "Benchmarks" section below).

As a microcontroller, Agon light™ has a control port featuring SPI, I2C, 20 distinct GPIOs (including UART lines), a system clock output, as well as power (3.3V and 5V) and ground rails. It also features a separate ACCESS.bus header.